Thursday, April 28, 2016

or up-cycling or re-purposing, reusing, reclaiming, recovering, rescuing, salvaging, or taking-some-piece-of-shit-you-find-lying-around-and-doing-something-else-with-it....whatever you want to call it, I LOVE IT. As was recently pointed out in an article sent to me by my brother-in-law, artists and poor people have been doing this for all of time. And it's genius.

Now I'm not talking here about getting your empty wine bottles into the right bin. That also is a good idea, but that's not what turns my crank. I like this kind of recycling....

Yep, that's an old bed frame made into a fence. I might have complained about those in the past since our neighbors have them everywhere but now, I get it. I find them beautiful in their simplicity, practicality, and they're easy on the pocket book. Isn't that better than, say, this purchased fencing

I think so.

This re-purposed material fence might have passed that line between brilliant reuse and squalor....

But that's probably the fault of the reuser not the reused.

Some more good salvaging....

those frames that I saved from the neighbor's pyre which David will soon make into raised garden beds.

I came home the other day to find this on the side of our house....

Yeah, looks like a pile of rocks because that's what it is....NOW. But just wait. Guess what we've got going on here

Yep. David and our friends Franco and Gino are making us a grill from stuff we've got just lying around every where. That's awesome.

Sunday, April 24, 2016

Some blogging friends have organized a virtual craft and reading circle day. We participants are, well, virtually crafting and reading together (real crafting and real reading, virtually together). Awesome. So I will be posting regularly throughout the day as will these folks:

Monday, April 04, 2016

new message from David: "is your car covered in oil this morning? mine is" (He was in SanRemo. We don't usually text each other when we're both in the house. That's what skype is for)

respond: "no. but I did notice that the electrical pylon in our car park is dripping."

respond: "WHAT? That's totally dangerous! Call ENEL now!"

I won't go into the frustrating farcical fucking phone calls I wasted a day making to our electric company, resulting in never reaching ONE real person, because it will just get me worked up again. Let's just say that the automated service didn't like my accent when I was trying to say our account number so it hung up on me.....EVERY TIME.

A day passes in which
1. we have no visit from the electric company. not a surprise, they don't know we have a problem.
2. no more dripping from the transformer. It must have run out of this toxic oil it was leaking.
3. David and I call everyone and anyone we know who might know someone who works at ENEL to try to get some help.

Then, the next day, David is driving into town and sees 4 ENEL trucks parked at the bar - FOUR. How about that for some luck!

That afternoon a couple young guys from the electric company come up to check out the situation. They assured me that there were no PCBs in that oil that leaked (David had been doing some heavy-duty research on what exactly drips out of a transformer) and they didn't assure me that anyone would be coming up soon to fix it.

me: "Well, if that oil was in the transformer, which we know it was because it leaked out, can't we assume that was in there for a reason and now it's not in there because it's all over my husband's car? Is this dangerous to have a transformer that close to the house without oil in it?"

ENEL guys: "naw. the worst that will happen is that you'll lose electricity."

me: "hmmm? and then?"

ENEL: "call us."

At which point the two guys and I had a slight disagreement about the urgency of getting that transformer fixed. They thought sometime within the week would be doable. I said today is a good day. We all did agree however that the phone service for ENEL sucks and the likelihood of my reaching a person if we lose power, is very slight.

That afternoon this happened (right after we lost power). They came back the SAME day, and I didn't even have to call!

Down with the old....

And up with the new...

The next day a couple guys came to do contamination control which resulted in them digging up all the dirt where the exploded transformer's oil sprayed.

This has left me with a couple of questions....

1. if they are so worried about damage that transformer oil did to our dirt in the place where we park our cars, should we be more worried about David's car which was covered with the stuff? Or perhaps that big blue plastic container which contains our WATER?